Change Without Progress

http://www.usmessageboard.com/general/144350-things-that-will-die-predictions.html

I like progress, but I don’t like change. If something is changing for the better, I am all for it, if it is just change for the sake of change, or if it is getting worse, I don’t like it. This article suggests several changes in our future and I think he is right about a number of them. The Post Office may be going away, and I am okay with that. Private companies should be allowed to carry first class mail, but they should be required to deliver Monday through Saturday and to every address in the nation as the Postal Service does now. Checks are going away, I believe this one too. I buy a lot of things on line and pay many of my bills on line. It saves the hassle of getting a stamp and all that. It’s automatic and free; those paper checks don’t write themselves.

The newspaper may go away; I think it will simply become fully electronic. I blog three blogs everyday, I don’t print them. I have readers all over the world; they would be hard pressed to get a printed copy of this every day from California in Japan, Poland, or New Zealand. Lots of newspapers already publish on line and many magazines have had paper editions go away.

Book are soon to follow, at least for most books I think this is true. Mrs. Bunkermeister has a Kindle and she loves it. As they become more capable it will be harder to avoid the electronic reader. I still love books for taking notes, and having ten of them spread out on my desk as one time but maybe someday we will all own five or ten e-readers. The land line phone is going too, I have Internet phone and the wife has a cell phone. It’s too expensive to put up more lines; many developing areas will never have land line phones.

Music, television, DVDs are all going away. I agree it will all be cloud computing. All our electronic music, movies, television shows will be seamlessly kept in the great computers in the sky. I think this will mean many in music, and television and the movies will have to take smaller salaries and smaller royalties. I also worry about big brother making specific content unavailable or altering it to appease the political correctness of the day. Just as you don’t own Kindle content, you just are licensed to read it and the license can be revoked or the content changed at any time without warning. The author of the article bemoans the loss of privacy too, but I think it is an overrated illusion anyway. Two hundred years ago we all lived in small farms and villages and everyone knew everyone and everything you did was common knowledge then. Now the village is electronic and worldwide; that’s the view from the Hysterical Right Wing.